The 12th Five Year plan will have a provision for Rs 5,000 crore for supercomputing. The aim is to bring India on a par with China and scale up High Power / Performance Computing (HPC),said Ashwani Kumar,Union Minister of State for Planning,Science and Technology and Earth Sciences. Kumar,on Wednesday,visited the High Performance Computing (HPC) Lab of Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) and the National Chemical Laboratory (NCL),besides the Film and Television Institute of India. Kumar said,The Indian government is seriously looking at accelerating R&D in HPC infrastructure development and technology proliferation. For this,an allocation of Rs 5,000 crore has been made in the 12th Plan. We plan to set up several supercomputing facilities in a three-tier architecture comprising of several small-scale HPC systems at various institutes,some medium-scale HPC systems at regional level,and a few large-scale HPC systems at the national level. These will be interconnected over the National Knowledge Network to provide access to institutes that do not have HPC facilities. A report has been prepared by Professor N Balakrishnan of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc),and the initial outlay of the amount is being kept for supercomputing. Our Prime Minister has shown a keen interest in supercomputers and another Rs 6,000 crore will be made available in a few years as work like genome sequencing,cancer research and weather forecasting cannot be done without HPCs. Professor Balakrishnan has prepared a preliminary report. He is already working on his second report. We will be preparing a roadmap about how to go about the work. The plan of action is to develop a scientific eco-system to increase the demand for these computers, he added.
